Yikes!!!
It's been a bit of a bad week in the veggie world. Despite what I - and lots of people - thought, Clint Eastwood is not actually a vegan or vegetarian. A NY Times reporter was interviewing him, and brought up the supposedly well-known "Clint as Vegan" topic - In 1986 he bought [the restaurant, which has] a piano bar, heart-stopping views of the ocean spray on Point Lobos and plenty of meat on the menu. Despite what you might have read on Wikipedia, Mr. Eastwood is not a vegan, and he looked slightly aghast when told exactly what a vegan is. “I never look at the Internet for just that reason,” he said.
And today there's a brief story about Paul McCartney and the Dalai Lama on the news websites. Turns out the Dalai Lama is NOT a vegetarian (who'd a thunk it!) and McCartney once tried, unsuccessfully, to convert him.
AND THEN, an actress named Bijou Phillips is interviewed in the LA Times and quite happily talks about veganism being crap and returning to "real" food again:
So you feel all right?
I feel good! I'm sick and I've been sick four times since I've been vegan and I hadn't been sick for five years before that. I need to eat food because this isn't working. Every vegan I know gets sick all the time.
AND FINALLY Canada's national newsmagazine, Macleans, has a lengthy story titled Will Soy Make My Son Gay. I looked into soy a while back and as far as I could see, it was fine for you. This article doesn't come down on either side of the argument, but OF COURSE they had to title it as provocatively as they do. Reminds me of this story from a while back... Rise of the Vegan Fairyboys. This writer got really hammered in the Global Vegan group on Facebook.
The only beneficial story I've seen the last few days comes (surprisingly!) from The Economist magazine's The World in 2009 special issue. In a piece called A Water Warning the President of Nestle mentions how resource intensive the meat-rich diet is compared to a veggie diet:
Diets are another variable. Europeans and Americans have for years had high proportions of meat in their diets, but now this trend is catching on in emerging markets as incomes rise. Meat requires ten times the water withdrawn per calorie by plants. So the average daily diet in California requires some 6,000 litres of water in agriculture, compared with 3,000 litres in countries such as Tunisia and Egypt.
If you've never read about the water issue before, try these:
As a Canadian, a shortage of water is the furthest thing from your mind, but this is really a massive problem.
5 comments:
I thought that the dalai lama turned vegetarian about a year ago. Did he go back to eating animals?
Wow that's brutal.....
Does anyone know if "Ellen" is vegetarian yet? She goes on and on about her love for animals on her show, but then makes jokes about turkeys at Thanksgiving etc. I know she and Portia had a vegan wedding, but are they actually veg in their daily lives? ... curious... Just thinking about the Dalai Lama and how people in such public positions have the ability to be role models but often aren't...
My impression is that he leans towards veggie-ism, but eats meat when he wants to. As recently as May 2007 he was even eating VEAL for pete's sake:
http://www2.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=605615&format=print
I mean, come on, VEAL of all things!
Just when you thought it was safe to be a vegetarian, it turns out according to her Wikipedia biography, Israeli Foreign Affairs Minister, Tzipi Livni has been a vegetarian since age 12. Just to show you, you can be a former member of Mossad, and "one-up" the Dalai Lama too.
i don't get the problem with veal...btw there is free range veal so if you are going to go on about confinement issues...and be brave and let all the comments show..if you are so certain of your stance let there be an open debate
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